MPACUK: Do the Saudis own Eid?
MPACUK (Muslim Public Affairs Council, UK) have three articles in response to the annual repeat of the “moon fitna” at the beginning and end of Ramadan:
Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti and a group of people attempted to sight the moon near Oxford, on a clear night, and did not see it. I’ve just got back from visiting a Muslim friend in south London (I won’t mention the district), who said he was disgusted with the politics in his local mosque, which he described as being like a “16th-century revolution”. The mosque authorities originally wanted to hold Eid on Sunday, on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be Saturday, but eventually gave in under public pressure, after all the other mosques decided to hold it on Saturday (and this was after holding taraweeh!). I was actually calling round on Friday evening, having read here that Eid here would be Monday - never mind Saturday or Sunday. But all I kept hearing was “Eid Mubarak - Eid is tomorrow”, following a supposedly reliable Saudi sighting. (My friend agreed that the correct Eid was probably today.)
I think we need to set up a proper moon-sighting authority in this country, in order to ascertain when the moon is genuinely sighted locally. We can’t rely on Saudi sightings, because of the large amounts of falsehood coming out of that country - the translations of the Qur’an and Sahih Bukhari full of Wahhabi propaganda, for example. How can we consider someone “adil” if he is an innovator?
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